


Cool Heart and Hands and Aptitude

by angelheadedhipster



Category: Lana Del Rey (Musician), Ultraviolence (Album) RPF
Genre: 50s, Black Leather, Cigarette smoke, Doom, F/M, New Years Resolution, Sort of based on real life, Ultraviolence, hair like spiderwebs, i read a lot of rolling stone articles while writing this, its unclear, noir, over the top prose, portent, retro sensibilities, sort of a period piece, yuletide i love you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 20:43:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5019766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelheadedhipster/pseuds/angelheadedhipster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"At the point I met Dan I didn't feel that confident. It sounds strange but him being interested in me made me feel interesting. He was a guy and he just kind of treated me like this New Yorker girl who wanted to make a record and was like, ‘Hey, let’s just see what happens.’ But he was in love with the songs."<br/>~ Lana Del Rey, BBC1 Radio interview, July 7 2014</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cool Heart and Hands and Aptitude

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darkrosaleen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkrosaleen/gifts).



> Notes: This project has given me renewed respect for Lana Del Rey, because it turns out its REALLY hard for me to write like her, where every damn word is full of portent and doom and tragic. You go, Lana. And you go, darkrosaleen, this prompt is a blast. Apologies for how late this is, but I hope you like it!

He walks in and she’s lying there, hair spilling over the side of the bed like a waterfall, like blood pooling on the sidewalk. She’s so beautiful it makes him need another drink.

Smoke trails up from her full red lips, aimlessly drifting toward the ceiling. She doesn't react when he comes in. She doesn't react to much.

Dan pours himself that drink. It's his fifth of the day - no, of the afternoon - but she won't care. She likes the taste of whiskey on his breath, licks into his mouth when he kisses her like that.

“They called,” says Lana, her voice smokier than any woman’s should be, honey and lace, rough like painted nails dragging down his back.

“Who?” He sits next to her, behind the crook in her knees. Those delicate knees, porcelain white, faint purple bruises under the skin. Her dressing gown is the exact same shade, a dark lavender. She is a girl who thinks about things like that.

“The fucking record company,” she says. She hasn’t moved, except to bring the cigarette closer to her lips and then farther again. He is never sure if she actually inhales, or if she just touches those bow of those red perfect lips to the tip. Smoke always wreaths around her anyway, like spider webs, like clouds on a rainy afternoon.

“They don’t like the album,” she says. A person who doesn’t know her well would think she has no opinion about this, but Dan knows her. Knows the faint tremor in her voice, the extra glisten in those big brown painted pools that are her eyes.

“Those fucking suits,” says Dan. She looked so sad.

He hadn’t liked her, at first. He’d seen her first in the backs clubs around the dark parts of the city, gloomy seedy places full of desperate people, where the singer wore all black or all gold, selling two different fairy tales. He’d thought she was another one of the wannabes, a girl who wanted the cherry on top of life without eating the whole sundae. She was one of a million girls like that, he thought.

Then he stopped seeing her in dark bars and on street corners, and started seeing her face on posters for concerts, on the backs of magazines advertising lipstick and ladies’ perfume. And he still didn’t like her - she looked stupid, he thought, fake. Made up. Nothing about her was genuine, he thought. She’d figured out a trick, a bluff, and she played what the chums wanted to hear to keep herself out of the gutter. She was a phony. Nothing about her was real.

But, those lips. He wasn’t real, either, a kid from the golden suburbs pretending to be a bluesman, claiming loyalty to a life that never existed. In this world, what was real anyway?

“What’d they say?” he asks her now, his fingers starting to trace up her neck, ragged fingernails marking the white lines of her throat.

“There’s no single,” she says. “That it won’t sell in Europe. That we need to meet with -” a pause, the cigarette back at her lips - “some prick in skinny jeans who recorded Adele’s last album.”

Dan growls, not forming any actual words. Her eyes flicker to him, just for a second, and then resume staring at the ceiling. She shifts, and the thin fabric of her dressing gown rustles over her perfect breasts, fluttering. Like there’s a slow breeze only she can feel.

They’d met at a bar. That’s where he met everyone. He’d been pretty blitzed, as usual, a night with Tom and the gang, and there she was. He knew who she was, knew she made music, but that night all he remembers is her hair falling in her face, looking at him like she was a starving puppy on the side of the road, and he was raw meat. “Take me home,” she’d said, and he had, what else could he do?

And then they’d started talking, the next morning, and they liked the same records. He liked the pout of her lips and the sounds she made when he pressed too hard inside her, he liked that she smoked more than he did and that her favorite session drummer was his favorite session drummer. And now he was producing her album, she lived in his house, and neither of them got out of bed before noon.

She isn’t speaking now, and his hand trails down her neck. Her other hand, the one that isn’t holding a cigarette, reaches around to grab him, and he reads, for the millionth time, “[trust no one](http://lanadelreyfan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/tattoo04.png)” inked into her skin.

He leans down and kisses her, her forehead and her nose, one hand still on her neck, claiming her and grounding her. “Let me get you a drink,” he says, standing up.

“Bourbon,” she says. “And a joint.”

She always has the best drugs; that’s why he hung around, at first, aside from the sex. She didn’t seem to mind, either. He wasn’t sure, then, if she even liked him, or if he was just the best of a bad lot. Or maybe the least worst of a bad lot. And then, and it took him much too long to realize this, he saw that she had become someone slightly different when he was around. Looser. She spoke more, she allowed herself to laugh at his jokes. Lana was someone different to everyone, but he could live with this version of her.

And when they started working together, she sang better when he was around. He could hear it on the tapes. She tapped her foot and looked at him through the window, and then her gaze shifted, off to whatever it was she looked at when she sang, but when she sang live with the band he picked out for her she nailed it every fucking time.

He was back with her drink now. She is staring at him, and her eyes are so deep, paint smudged in the corners. He doesn’t really know her at all. He’s never seen her without her eyelashes on.

“I don’t want to call them back,” she says.

“We don’t have to,” he says, and hands her the drink, cold droplets where their hands meet. “We don’t need to change anything, and we won’t.”

She is sitting up now, her cigarette mostly ash, hanging over the side of the bed. Her knees are tucked into her chest, like a girl protecting herself from the world. She nods, sips, knocks back the whiskey in one go.

He drinks his, also - he’d poured himself another - and takes off his jacket, black leather falling to the floor behind him. He leans towards her, arms on either side, not touching. Just looming over her, breathing slowly as she watches.

“And the label can fuck off and go to hell,” he says. “Because I know what happens when you don’t get your way.” She is smiling now, ever so slightly, that strange half sloping quirk of her mouth. He leans closer, their faces almost touching.

“Show me,” she breathes.

He grins, he can’t help it. She is such a willing victim, and he never claimed to be one of the good guys.

He grabs her by the shoulders and shoves her down, Lana laughing and squealing, her voice going breathless. With one hand he holds her hands above her head, and the other moves over her hips, her stomach, bunching up and pushing aside the sheer satin of her gown.

He kisses her and she squirms against him, her breath coming through in gasps, her lips redder and fuller than ever.

She arcs into him, pressing her breasts against his chest, her thighs around his hips, and with his eyes closed he sees flashes of other moments like this, of her eyes wide or screwed shut, nails running down in his back, bound wrists and Lana shuddering beneath him, begging to come and screaming when he says no.

“Easy,” he says, pushing her back down into the bed. “We’re just getting started.”

She was so much smarter than people thought. She made the world she wanted. Sometimes he thought she’d made him, invented him from one of her songs. Rough and handsome, a liar and a drunk. That was a line of hers, probably.

He didn’t care. If he’d been invented, it was to be watched by pools of brown under impossibly long lashes, like raven’s wings. It was to see those eyes darken, untether, as he pulled her clothes off, as he held her down and snaked the rope across her wrists, as he pressed his fingers into her skin. The clouds that seemed to always swirl around her lifted, and she was sharp and sparkling, and she was his.


End file.
